Four generations:
Three continents: Two world wars: One village
The story line traverses through different time lines, locations or
incidents with no particular order. The only order being the
alphabetical one – A to Z meant purposefully for the A to Z challenge. These
posts can be read as standalone posts, but would be best comprehended if
you read them along with their prelude provided as a link.
Click Here to read the Prelude – C – Calcutta -1907
G –
Geneva - 1930
It was
the year 1928. One afternoon, Sundari’s
husband returned home unnaturally jubilant and restlessly excited. A couple of days prior, Krishnan, the
research assistant and her husband were neck deep in discussion over an
experiment that they had set up at the laboratory. Krishnan had asked for a day off since it was
his Father’s shrarddham ceremony and
was to come back the day after to pursue the findings of the experiment that
had been set up in the laboratory.
Lakshmi
had sought Sundari’s help for the preparations for the Shrarddham ceremony and like in the previous years, Sundari would go over to help in the
elaborate preparations of the meals for the Brahmins who were to be fed an
elaborate feast as a mark of thanksgiving to the dead ancestors of her
husband.
It is
during rituals like these or during festivities like Deepavali and Pongal
that both families reciprocated and helped each other, which would not
have been the case if they were living in their home land. But in Calcutta
where few spoke their language and shared their customs and tradition, they
networked with almost everyone from their clan for a sense of
belongingness and kinship.
In the
Calcutta of the 1920’s many families from the Madras presidency migrated in
search of living and were employed as accountants or clerks in the British
firms. It was a mini Diaspora which
preserved the traditions and customs in as exacting a manner as it would be if
they would all be back home.
Sundari
was taken aback when her husband forbid her going over to Krishnan’s place to
help Lakshmi out with the preparation
for the Shrarddham ceremony. It was a ritual that they followed for the
twenty odd years that they had known each other’s families in Calcutta.
He was
a man known for his high temper and flamboyance amongst his students and
colleagues, but was not known to interfere in family matters. If anything one could describe their marital
life, it was distant but serene.
Since
that incident, the visits between the two families became less frequent. The
late evening discussions and debates over scientific research almost ceased. Every
time Lakshmi and Krishnan visited them, Sundari could sense a tension in the
relationship between her husband and his research assistant.
Her
husband had sailed abroad many times to attend scientific conferences and other official engagements. It was not something that a pious Hindu born
into the Brahmin community did in those times.
It was a widely held belief that a Brahmin who crossed the sea ceased to
be a Brahmin.
Her
husband scoffed it as a regressive belief that his clan held and would often
question the existence of God. It gave
Sundari sleepless nights and anxious days when she worried hoarse if her
husband’s blasphemous statements would incur the wrath and curses of the gods from above.
She loved him despite his beliefs and felt
that it was a phase in his life that would pass. It was his flamboyance and
extreme confidence over his abilities that made her fall head over heels in
love with him. Truth be told, she
nursed a great sense of pride in being
his wife. After all, by now he was a
widely respected scientist at the Tata institute of fundamental research in
Mumbai. Their house was an intellectual hotbed for physicists from all over
India and the rest of the world.
Nevertheless, she diligently prayed every day,
followed all rituals that her husband’s family expected her to follow and made
sure that their two sons were raised as traditional Brahmin boys.
It was
the year 1930. One day her husband
casually remarked that she should get ready for a long voyage. There was a supreme sense of confidence and flamboyance
in his demeanour.
He
inherited his sense of flamboyance and confidence that dangerously skirted the
signs of arrogance from his maternal side of the family. When she was a little girl, she had observed
Sapthagiri Shastry, her husband’s maternal grandfather, who was instrumental in
bringing together their marriage alliance, whenever he visited her
parent’s house.
Sapthagiri
Shastry was a highly respected Sanskrit scholar and was the head of
Agaramangudi’s Prestigious Veda
Pathashala. He would
indiscriminately rubbish other Sanskrit scholars who did not share his intellectual
horsepower without any qualms whatsoever.
It
would be a virtual monologue, whenever he came visiting her father’s home in Tiruchy. Her father out of respect for the highly
acclaimed learned man would listen to him patiently and would never challenge
him about his opinions.
Sundari,
then an impressionable girl in her teens
and not quite an adult would find
this behaviour of the old man very obnoxious. But then she was a just a little
girl and no one really asked for an opinion from a girl. A guest was to be treated like god and that
is how a learned Brahmin scholar who came to visit them, would be treated.
In her
husband, she found the same genetic traits as his maternal grandfather, only
this time it was not a Sanskrit scholar but a renowned physicist.
As the ship left the docks in Mumbai, Sundari felt a strong sense of unexplained
melancholy grappling her.
It was
supposed to be a proud moment. A
moment that came rarely, if ever, in a woman’s life of her times. It was almost as if her father’s predictions
about the juxtapositions of the stars in her horoscope had come true. She along with her husband were now sailing
to go to Geneva in Europe.
Their
tickets aboard the liner that would take them to Europe had been booked almost
four months in advance by her husband.
That was when he had told her to get ready for a voyage.
But it
was not until about three weeks ago that the announcement came about in the
newspapers.
The
entire nation was celebrating and just about everyone, not just the scientific
community were immensely proud of her
husband. He was interviewed by almost
every newspaper. Their relatives from Agaramangudi and Tiruchy
sent them congratulatory telegrams and postcards that would reach them two
weeks after the announcement came in the newspapers.
Her astrologer father, Raghava Shastry, who
had predicted the good fortune in his daughter and son-in-law's horoscope, was
all over the place beaming with pride. He now made it public to anyone who
cared to listen to him that he had foreseen this in their horoscopes almost 23
years ago in 1907.
There
were hundreds of people who came to see the couple off. They congratulated her husband before they boarded their ship
that would take them to Southampton in Britain from where they would travel to
Geneva to receive the prestigious prize.
As much
as she tried hard, she could not brush away the strong sense of melancholy that
overpowered her and she could now point out the reason to herself.
In all
these weeks of celebrations, congratulations and jubilations, she never heard
back from Krishnan and Lakshmi.
A few
months ago Krishnan resigned from his job in Calcutta and went back to settle
down in his home town in Tiruchy to teach physics at the Bishop Heber College.
Hello Jayanthi, stopping in from A to Z and thank for your continued participation!
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